Problem
Almost two billion euros—25% of the Ministry of Health’s budget—are allocated to medicines. Of this amount, one tenth is covered by the Apifarma Agreement. The aim was to create a solution to monitor, audit, and oversee invoices issued by pharmaceutical companies—the entities that sell the medicines—as well as credit notes covered by this agreement. This agreement involves ACSS (Central Administration of the Health System), the various institutions and hospitals of the National Health Service, the Ministry of Health, and the Pharmaceutical Industry.
The immediate questions to be answered for invoices (and also credit notes) under this agreement were: Is the invoice compliant? Has it already been paid? Does the amount match? Has the hospital approved it? Is there agreement between the parties involved regarding certain invoices? How, and by whom, is any disagreement between the parties (hospital and pharmaceutical company) resolved?
Solution
Addressing this issue required creating an approval workflow made up of several stages through which the invoice passes, alongside distinct user groups with their own credentials depending on the stage the invoice is in. This reality fit perfectly with the architecture of the Masterlink Platform—with its own engines for configuring this type of business activity—so the solution came to life in under a week.
The application is fed by parallel processes where hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are registered, while each invoice is handled only by authorised user profiles according to the stage it is in and the hospital/institution to which they belong.
Benefits
In addition to the monitoring and oversight mentioned above, as well as auditing these documents, it also enables the collection of structured information, with a very significant reduction in administrative work. It also allows real-time tracking of invoices throughout their approval/rejection workflow, and of the execution of the underlying contracts.
There is also a set of advantages inherent to the fact that the application is hosted on the Masterlink Platform, which makes it easy to scale and, at the same time, provides autonomy for ACSS users to add new fields, new stages, and configure, in a user-friendly way and within a visual context, all the needs that arise over time.
